Michel Foucault is one of the supreme voices of French poststructuralist theory. In brief, poststructuralism is a school of thought that emerged in the 1960s in reaction to the structuralist ideas of objective knowledge and absolute truth. Poststructuralist thinkers emphasized the instability of meanings and sought to undermine theoretical systems that claimed to have universal validity. In essence, they sought to show how meaning and knowledge is constructed, not absolute, and examined “how we know what we know.” Poststructuralism is often understood from a literary angle, especially in the United States, although Foucault didn’t necessarily intend his work to apply particularly to literature. Indeed, it has influenced a variety of disciplines, including philosophy and history. His two major works from the 1960s, The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge, address the historico-ontological status of language and, especially in The Archeology of Knowledge, provide a methodology for approaching the history of thought. His major works in the 1970s, Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, explore the genealogy of power relations. In this presentation I will mainly address the work Foucault produced in the 1960s, along with discussing his life and his strategies in approaching his work.

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers, France to Dr. Paul Foucault and Anne Foucault. Although his father hoped Michel would go on to be a doctor, he took a strong interest in literature and history during his early school years in Poitiers. In 1943 he prepared to enroll at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, but did not initially pass his entrance exams.

Due to the lack of traditional theoretical positions in Foucault's work, it is helpful to approach it, as David R. Shumway points out in Michel Foucault, through an understanding of the four major strategies Foucault uses to understand his subject matters (14). They are: reversal, discontinuity, specificity, and exteriority.

In The Order of Things, Foucault offers an analysis of the modern social sciences and critiques the modern concept of man. He divides modern history into three discontinuous periods (the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the modern era) defined by their individual epistemes and places them in a vertical sequence to discover their relations. Thus he attempts to show how the social sciences were constructed by each historical period and how they (the sciences) are related to forms of knowledge that characterize the period. So although The Order of Things is in chronological order, Foucault is not interested in showing how thought evolved from era to era or how the sciences progressed from age to age. In fact, he shows their discontinuity by examining how thought systems are mere artifacts of each historical formation.

In The Archeology of Knowledge Foucault explains the methodology he used in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. In essence, it is Foucault's attempt to show how his work is different from traditional means of understanding history. He describes his strategy of discontinuity and argues that disciplines like grammar, medicine, and economics have no positive unity.  What unites them are the "rules of formation" that determine how new statements can be made within a given discipline. That is, they are united by the system that creates fields of discipline.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1986.

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